You must think I’m nuts. I downloaded 67 GIGABYTES worth of MMOGs to test. 26 of the suckers, 10 of which I’m focussing on here. As for the other 16? Well, they’re listed at the bottom of the article. If and when I get around to discussing them, they’ll be linked here as well. Let’s just say they weren’t worth my time to review, for one reason or another. Not necessarily because they were bad (although some were beyond bad)… just that I had to choose a sample that would be the games that I’d be most interested in trying out. Besides, it’s not as if one MMO isn’t enough already for most people that actually want a social life. Like you know, a social life that doesn’t involve hitting / or ENTER first.  And I had to pick and choose. So these are the ones I chose:

Dungeon Runners (overview forthcoming)

Guild Wars (overview forthcoming)

Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Everquest II

World of Warcraft (overview forthcoming)

City of Heroes/Villains

Lord of the Rings Online

Runes of Magic

Ryzom

The Chronicles of Spellborn

Happily, I can say that I managed thus far (knock on wood) to avoid severe addiction to any of them. Well, mostly.

The Scope

Before I even get started, I should mention something: I’m a PvEer. I don’t play PvP and it’s not my focus, nor interest. So I didn’t test out any PvP while playing these games. If that’s your thing, these articles may still be of interest to you, but they are talking only in terms of the PvE component of these games. Just thought I’d mention that up front.

I’m not going to be writing hard-core, in-depth reviews of each of these games. If you want reviews of them, the vast majority of these games (perhaps excepting a lot of the free to play ones) have been reviewed ad nauseum elsewhere on the web. What I’m going to do is tell you which ones I think are worth the time downloading and testing. I’ll tell you what I liked, what annoyed me, and what I thought stood out – both in a good and bad way. If you are a newbie, this might be a good place to start before you get your download on.

Just FYI, I don’t really get into that whole ‘role-playing’ business very much. I play these games to get sweet loot. I play to kill monsters.. of some sort or another. I suppose leveling and assign skills or stats has become synonymous with role-playing, which I don’t entirely buy, or take part in. But whatever, that’s for another article.

NEWB!

First and foremost, the difference between a ‘newbie/newb’ and a ‘noob/n00b’. The Urban Dictionary breaks it down like this: Newbs are those who are new to some task* and are very beginner at it, possibly a little overconfident about it, but they are willing to learn and fix their errors to move out of that stage. n00bs, on the other hand, know little and have no will to learn any more.

Read more here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=noob.

The Breakdown

The articles are broken up into 3 main categories, as I see them:  Free to play games with cash shops (Part 1), Free to play games with caveats (Part 2), and Pay to play games (Part 3).

For each game, I’ve tried to give it an honest shot. Really. Even if it sucked and I swore at myself for doing this while playing, I pushed on. I put myself through the torture so you wouldn’t have to. For the greater good, right? That’s not to say that I played each of these games up to level 30 or anything. Heck, I doubt I broke level 10 in more than a handful. But that wasn’t really the point of these articles; if you want guides, go elsewhere. These articles are intended to give you first impressions of the games and to summarize whether or not it’s worth your while to wait several days (for anything over 3gb) to download and play.

The System

I’ll be talking a bit about how the games perform, so I should give you some context about what I’m running them all on. It’s not a dream rig, but it isn’t bad. I put it together about 6 months ago for a modest $1700 or so. You should be able to build a similar machine now for much less. Nothing’s overclocked, it’s all running at defaults.

Here’s the specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad 2.83Ghz
4 GB RAM
BFG GTX 260 896MB
Built-in Realtek sound
640 GB HDD
Windows XP SP3
26″ LCD running at 1920×1200

I attempted to run every game at full screen and at my default resolution. If possible, I cranked the graphics to the max. I’ll let you know how each game performed at those settings.

The Games

These overviews focus on three main types of MMORPGs: Free to Play games with Cash Shops, Free to Play games with Caveats, and Pay to Play games.

For the uninitiated, the first type listed are games that are (and this is loudly screamed at you on pretty much EVERY game’s site) – Free to Sign Up (no credit card necessary), Free to Download, and Free to Play. So what’s a Cash Shop? That’s how these games make their money. They offer bits & bobs for you to buy via RMT or MT – short for Real Money Transactions or Micro-Transactions – which allow you to enhance your character or overall playing experience. Whether or not you buy anything is completely up to you. So theoretically, you could play each and every one of the following games without every spending a dime.

The second type are Free to Play, but have caveats that adjust your gameplay experience. So what are the caveats? Well, that’s different for each game. I’ll outline what the limitations are on a game-by-game basis.

The final type are Pay to Play games. Clearly, if you want to play them beyond the trial, you have to pay monthly to do so. In some cases, you’ll also have to pay for the game before you can play them, on top of the monthly fee.

I’ve downloaded and tested the following games:

Free to Play games with Cash Shops
Runes of Magic

Free to Play games with Caveats

The Chronicles of Spellborn
Dungeon Runners
Guild Wars
Pirates of the Caribbean Online
Ryzom (formerly the Saga of Ryzom and Ryzom Ring)

Pay to Play games

City of Heroes/Villains

Everquest II

Lord of the Rings Online

World of Warcraft

All right, enough precursor, click on the links below to read what I thought about these games.

Other games I tried in the name of science:

2 Moons

9 Dragons

Air Rivals

Archlord

Atlantica Online

Ether Saga Online

Florensia

Rohan Online

Perfect World International

Pirates of the Burning Sea

Shaiya

Star Wars Galaxies

Talisman Online (shudder)

Vanguard

Warhammer Online

World of Kung Fu

State: Final
Website: http://www.piratesonline.com
Developer/Publisher: Disney.com Games
The Pitch: Set sail on the vast blue waters of the Caribbean in search of adventure, fortune, and fame in the world of the infamous Jack Sparrow and the evil Jolly Roger.

That’s reasonably accurate. If you liked the movie and you enjoy playing with stuffed animals, this is likely your game… because this game is targeted squarely at kids, even though there may be enough to like here for adults as well.

The Caveat

The free version of the game limits you in a variety of ways. First and foremost, you must play the game in a window and you are subjected to ads. The maximum resolution for your windowed experience is 1024×768. The game window runs at 1280×1024, with the ads included, but your viewport stays at 1024×768.

In addition, you are exempt from the following:

Unlimited access to all weapons and skills
Create and lead a Pirate guild
Access to advanced ships
Customize your Pirate with clothing, tattoos and more
Create up to 4 avatars
Access to all game chapters and quests
Engage in Boss battle
Access to all the Caribbean islands
Ad-free gameplay

That’s a pretty substantial list of limitations on top of the windowed, ad-riddled game window. A membership will run you $5 for your first month and $10 for every month after that.

Unique to Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Theme. No elves or dwarves here, no sir. This is chock-full of Pirate-y goodness, with lots of Yarrrr and swabbing of the deck, matey! Of course it’s not completely unique; there’s also Pirates of the Burning Sea, with which it shares the theme. But in the vast sea of Elf-peppered MMOs, a Pirate theme certainly stands out.

Voodoo magic. Well they couldn’t leave magic out entirely, right? That would just be madness! MADNESS! So they threw in a pseudo-hot Voodoo witch doctor to train you up but quick on how to destroy your enemies (which is to say nearly everyone) with glowing balls of voodoo.

Ship combat. Once again, done in Burning Sea. I know. Just ignore that for a moment. Whereas in PotBS Ship combat is its own little strategy game, here it’s more like a car race with guns. There’s not a lot of depth to it, but it’s hella fun when you sink a Galleon 4 levels above you. It’s not super-fast, mind you, but that’s a good thing when you’ve got no crew and you have to shoot the guns yourself.

Performance

Considering the graphics are far from what you’d call state of the art, the performance was disappointing, to say the least. Even in a 1024×768 window, it didn’t run great. I even paid the $5 fee to sub for a month to see if it got better fullscreen (there’s logic for ya). It didn’t. So… where’s all the horsepower under my hood (so to speak) going? We’ve got flat textures, uber-block models and poor animations. Surely it should run better than this?! Sorry to tell you this but it doesn’t.

The Good

Fun. So if you just read the Performance and The Bad sections, you’d probably think I hated this game. You’d think that I was saying it was another crap MMO cashing in on a license. Half of that statement is true. The part about cashing in on a license. But it isn’t a crap MMO. Not by a long shot. I was all set to hate this game. Not that I wanted to, but my initial impressions with the performance issues were bad ones. I was ready to give up and write a scathing overview slinging around words like ‘shiver-me-timbers!’ and ‘Crikey!’. But … well, I kept playing. And I found that I was having fun. A lot of fun. They did some interesting things here which make this game interesting. There’s active targeting with handguns. You have to click to slash with your sword and click in rhythym to get a combo going. It’s not much but it at least feels a bit more like actual combat than just slapping at number keys. Well, you do that here too, but there’s also the clicking.

Ship combat.I mentioned this under Unique to.. but I’m saying it again because it’s just fun. You pilot your own ship around the Caribbean. You can leave the wheel while in combat and grab one of the cannons and lay into your opponents. This is awesome. If you have a crew on board with you (your party), you can have them take care of that and you can just steer and pick up the loot. I loved this part of the game. It’s easy, noisy, and entertaining.

Well-implemented questing. The quests aren’t deep. But there’s quite a few to do and they are implemented well with your radar and in game. Any quest that you’ve chosen to track shows up in two places: on your radar as an arrow that points to your destination around the outer rim, and in the game world as an enormous shaft of light that streams down from the sky. If you’re in the zone, you’ll see it. It’s well done; you’re never wondering where you’re supposed to go to kill 3 Scorpions. Just look up, swivel.. Ah there it is.

Incredibly fast download. This is likely streamed or something, I’m not sure. But the amount of time between when I clicked ‘Download’ and when I was playing was somewhere around 10 minutes. That is fantastic, and it makes trying it out just that much easier, especially when some of these trials are upwards of 9GB. (Everquest II, I’m looking at you.)

The Bad

Disney: Nothing quite says ‘kid’s game’ quite as much as a Disney-branded MMO. You can’t even shoot people… only when they’ve been transformed into zombie pirates. Seriously? Yep. You have to hold a ‘cursed coin’ to get transformed and then you’re fair game.

I’m not turned off too much by the Disney logo. If the theme interests me, I’ll give it a shot. In my opinion, I’m more likely to enjoy this than an anime-themed MMO, but that’s just me. Your mileage may vary.

Cartoony Graphics. Hand in hand with the above, the graphics are cartoony. Some people hate this, some people love it. I’m ambivalent. I’d be more enthusiastic about them if the game just ran smoother.

Community. I’m not trying to come down hard on the community that exists. I’m sure they’re great. There does seem to be a community, so that’s something, right? However, since the game was developed with a teen – or possibly younger, with supervision – audience in mind, you have to expect that you’re going to be playing with teenaged players a lot of the time. This may or may not be a bad thing, but I suspect most people are going to view it with a certain amount of apprehension no matter what.

Performance. I’ve got to say it again.. this game should perform WAY better on my rig.

Summary

As I mentioned before, I had a lot of fun with this game. I suspect it’s not on a lot of people’s radar, and that’s a shame. For what it is, it’s entertaining and most of all, different from what you might be accustomed to. I won’t likely subscribe to this, but I’m definitely going to be keeping it installed for a while.

Download value: [rating: 6.5] (6.5)